daf bit: Nedarim 48

The mishna discusses using an intermediary to get around a vow. Suppose a father has vowed not to benefit from his son. His son wants to host a banquet for his own son's wedding, and the mishna proposes that he give the banquet (that is, the resources to pay for it) to a neighbor on the condition that his father be invited. The gemara debates whether this is valid, and concludes that if he says "so that my father can come" it is legal but if he says "on condition that my father can come", it is not a legitimate gift. The decision must be left to the recipient, but the giver is allowed to make a request. (48b)

vroom?

For about the last nine months, LiveJournal has served pages rather slowly for me on my home network (two machines, two operating systems, four browsers). This has not been a problem with any othner sites, and a friend with the same ISP reported no problems when I asked him to try LJ. It's worked fine at the few wireless hotspots I've taken the laptop to. LJ said they had no clue. (In case you're wondering, to compensate I launch all links from my friends page into new tabs. I am the queen of parallel processing.)

Tonight, all of a sudden, the site is fast, after being basically hung this morning. (I'd restarted the browser and none of the tabs would load. Tonight most were corrupted in some way, but reloads worked.) Ironically, the only slow page I've seen tonight is the posting page.

I am absolutely, positively, not looking this gift horse in the mouth. But I'm curious about what changed. I wasn't able to debug it before, so I doubt I can analyze it now. I hope the new behavior sticks around.

Edited to add: I just discovered, by accident, that the "style=mine" directive now works for journals, not just individual posts. Wow! Occasionally I come across a journal that I'd like to read, but I don't want to subscribe yet (maybe I'm checking it out) and the colors and fonts make my eyeballs bleed. No more!

If this is the sort of service the new Russian owners are serving up, I say keep it coming. :-)